We're all doomed.
Doomed!
DOOMED!!!
Posted on 07/21/2005 6:11:32 AM PDT by dennisw
America's coming economic crisis. A look back from the election of 2016
***EXCERPT***
Or perhaps we should call it the first domino to fall, because what then happened had a kind of geometric inevitability. The next domino was a thousand miles across the Caribbean, in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, originally elected as a crusading left-winger, was by then well into his role as an outright military dictator. For years our diplomats had grumbled that Chavez was "Castro with oil," but after the real Castro's death the comparison had new meaning. A right-wing militia of disgruntled Venezuelans, emboldened by the news that Castro was gone, attempted a coup at the beginning of 2009, shortly after the U.S. elections. Chavez captured the ringleaders, worked them over, and then broadcast their possibly false "confession" that they had been sponsored by the CIA. That led to Chavez's "declaration of economic war" against the United States, which in practice meant temporarily closing the gigantic Amuay refinery, the source of one eighth of all the gasoline used on American roadsand reopening it two months later with a pledge to send no products to American ports.
That was when the fourthand worstworld oil shock started.15 For at least five years economists and oilmen alike had warned that there was no "give" in the world oil market. In the early 2000s China's consumption was growing five times as fast as America'sand America was no slouch. (The main difference was that China, like India, was importing oil mainly for its factories, whereas the United States was doing so mainly for its big cars.16) Even a temporary disruption in the flow could cause major dislocations.
All the earlier oil shocks had meant short-term disruptions in supply (that's why they were "shocks"), but this time the long term was also in question. Geologists had argued about "peaking" predictions for years, but the concept was on everyone's lips by 2009.17
The Democrats had spent George Bush's second term preparing for everything except what was about to hit them. Our forty-fourth president seemed actually to welcome being universally known as "the Preacher," a nickname like "Ike" or "Honest Abe." It was a sign of how much emphasis he'd put on earnestly talking about faith, family, and firearms to voters in the heartland, in his effort to help the Democrats close the "values gap." But he had no idea what to do (to be fair, the man he beat, "the Veep," would not have known either) when the spot price of oil rose by 40 percent in the week after the Chavez declarationand then everything else went wrong.
Anyone who needed further proof that God is a Republican would have found it in 2009. When the price of oil went up, the run on the dollar began. "Fixed exchange rates with heavy interventionin essence, Bretton Woods Two] have enormous capacity to create an illusory sense of stability that could be shattered very quickly,"
http://www.forestcouncil.org/tims_picks/view.php?id=1121
What is Fallows talking about?? An asteroid hit the Earth in 2010 and there never was an election in 2016. We were all dead by then. Get it right, man!
Geeze, what an idiot. In 2016 the US and China are in the middle of a nuclear war. Moron.
It's like watching toddlers try to rebuild a transmission.
In other words...everything bad that happens in the future will be the fault SUV driving Christians and GW Bush.
ping
There seems to be no end of ignorant idiots on FR and in the larger world of New and Old Media who know absolutely nothing about economics, yet who are simultaneously willing to not only analyze but to predict major macroeconomic developments.
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Alas you are so right and who are UNWILLING to learn the least bit about how economies work. One might think someone interested in this area of prediction would want to at least try to learn how economies work.
This is the same guy that was touting Japan, Inc. as the next great power back in the 80's. I don't think he's ever been right about anything.
He didn't even cover the 2014 bubble in beachfront Nevada and Tennessee real estate.
Even Madonna can write (poor) fiction..
You would think.
Yet I have been informed on this forum that:
(1) A dollar-pegged currency is the same thing as a floating currency.
(2) An optimal use of financial resources is to have zero national debt.
(3) The budget deficit and the current account deficit are the same thing.
(4) Only Americans should invest in treasury securities - foreign investment of any kind in America is dangerous, but credit investment is deadly.
(5) Foreign creditors can "bankrupt" Ameerica at a moment's notice if they choose to.
(6) Anywhere from 30-50 American states have "declared bankruptcy".
The list of idiocies goes on and on.
You mean to say that oil is a commodity, money is fungible, and the oil producers are dependent on their income from oil?
This is truly surprising....
How many MPG am I going to get on my Flying Car in 2016?
Oh, wait a minute. My flying car is going to have nuclear power! I forgot...
Its all BS. Not a single mention of the big nuclear attack on August 6th.
Oil is not so fungible when China ties up Venezuelan and Iran oil with long term contracts. Which they just did. What do you think these two rogue nations get from China for their oil? Weaponry and military technology perhaps? In fact the Chinese strategy is to get a lot of oil under long term contacts to their three state owned oil corporations. One of which is making noises about buying up UNOCAL>
heh! see me post #18
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